STRFKR Successfully Doubles Down on Itself

In their 9 years together, Portland based Starfucker (STRFKR) has drawn many criticisms, the most common being that their name is terrible. Their latest release, Being No One, Going Nowhere, doesn’t resolve that fundamental issue (they once tried, briefly, changing their name to Pyramiddd but quickly reverted, rejecting the notion of changing themselves for commercial reasons and fired their agent), but it does address other criticisms—that their studio albums will never match the quality of their live performance, that they are a poor man’s MGMT, that the band’s somewhat highfalutin intellectual streak is groan inducing—and does so by confidently doubling down on the idiosyncrasies that first set them apart.

Being No One, Going Nowhere is a fiercely ambitious album, composed in what sounds like the expansive delirium that follows a hallucinogenic experience. It often feels like it’s trying to communicate some larger truth, but can’t seem to find the words, instead resorting to neon-colored dance rhythms and highly textured synthesizers that conjure the expansive feeling of galaxies. These qualities make the comparison to MGMT understandable, but that doesn’t make them totally accurate, or sentence STRFKR to being ignobly derivative. Joshua Hodges’ voice will sometimes adopt Andrew VanWyngarden’s howling alto when songs have ruffled themselves into an electronic frenzy, but that’s just a motif of the genre. Besides, by all counts, Hodges is, for better or worse, obsessed with the musical ideas that proliferate STRFKR albums, and mimicry would get in the way of the requisite exploration. Most of his search occurs in the album’s first half, before STRFKR gets lost in their self-made planetarium in the second.

The album opens to an astral dance floor, in which oddly grounded lyrics are coupled with expansive sounds, mustering feelings of sublime awe buffered by self-aware naiveté, like looking through a telescope for the first time and understanding the incomprehensible scope of things. In “Never Ever”, Hodges points to the liberating power of this realization, singing, “All my friends all my enemies / All wrapped up down in front of me / All red white oh so good to be / Free from every desire”. At other times, STRFKR will take your ear and guide you through the experience of blasting off, transporting you from a place of silence up through a sonic wormhole. “Something Ain’t Right” provides the best example of this, crescendoing at the start and dropping us off on an icy plane where sounds skip off the surface and Hodges’ voice descends from somewhere above, disembodied and looming.

A short interlude features the majestic voice of Alan Watts, waxing about the existence of the “other self”, a far-flung, immortal iteration of you, written into the code of the universe. This break from the dance floor also marks a tonal change in the album, and the songs that follow seem less interested in asking questions and more concerned with experiencing the sublime. Unfortunately, this indulgence makes for less interesting music, and it feels like a conversation has ended. “Maps”, the 8th track, is Being No One at it’s most spaced out, the lyrics barely intelligible, trailing the dramatic rhythms like the wispy tail of a comet. The album’s eponymous conclusion is similarly expansive, composed with a muted energy and aiming to mine our sense of wonder, but somehow misses the mark.

Being No One is STRFKR’s fourth album. In a testament to Hodges’ vision, they have forgone the familiar markers of growth and decided instead to become more and more themselves, evolving internally rather than outwardly. It’s hard to see how a band can continue in the same vein for so long and avoid redundancy, but for now, STRFKR have managed to create an album that validates their past stubbornness, even if it does sometimes get lost meandering the solar system. If anything, Hodges’ profound sense of wonder is an inspiration itself.